UPS brought me my newest toy!

This afternoon the UPS delivery driver brought me my newest toy - my very first true wide angle lens. Last week I ordered the Sigma 10-20mm zoom. Before that, my widest lens was a 28-70 zoom and I never really thought I needed anything wider for wedding and portrait work. But, I'm going on a short vacation in April and I thought having a wider lens would come in handy for some of the shooting I planned to do then.

I had done some research before and felt the Sigma was the best wide angle lens for my needs. Sure, the Nikkor 12-24 gets tons of raves but I'm quite fond of my Sigma glass (I also use their 28-70 and 70-200 zooms) so I didn't have any reservations about buying their wide angle.

I really wanted to break it in shooting some landscapes or architecture, but it's been snowing constantly since 2pm and I didn't really feel like going out and shooting in that, so I decided to take some shots inside the house instead. As soon as I peered through the viewfinder, I was amazed. At 10mm the lens was so unbelievably wide that it was astonishing.

I can't wait to put it to proper use, but for now here are some snapshots, starting off with photos of the actual lens.





Just to demonstrate the difference between a wide angle and a more standard lens (in this case my 50mm prime), I took some shots out of two different windows, standing at the same spots each time. The first photo of each "scene" is the 50mm and the second is the wide angle at 10mm.









After that I just took some pics of random objects (and my dog). Shooting close objects at 10mm leads to some neat distortion.